TL;DR – the Visual Studio 2015 ALM VM and HOL’s / demo scripts can be found here: https://aka.ms/ALMVMs. ++++++++++++ It’s been almost a year since I transitioned away from my role as an evangelist for Microsoft’s ALM/DevOps offerings into a role as a program manager on the Visual Studio Online / TFS team. It’s been a…

Post updated Aug 19, 2015 to reflect VLSC availability. ******* Since Team Foundation Server 2015 RTM was released last week, we’ve already seen a lot of people upgrade and start taking advantage of the new capabilities. We have also received several questions about where to find a product key. The answer depends on the channel…

I’m pleased to announce that today we’ve published the Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 ALM Virtual Machine. This includes several updates to the hands-on-labs / demo scripts to show off some of the new capabilities which have been added in Updates 1 – 3. With the continuous stream of great updates coming to Visual Studio…

Last week at Build 2014, Bill Staples showed off a preview of the new Microsoft Azure portal for the first time. You can jump to his demo in Scott Guthrie’s keynote. The new portal was built from the ground up to put your applications at the center of the experience. This may sound like an…

I’m pleased to announce that the 2013 edition of our popular Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio book series is now available! The purpose of this book has always been to educate people on the breadth of capabilities in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server which enable software teams to collaborate across the entire…

I just discovered a new book on TFS 2013 Customization written by Gordon Beeming, whom I had the pleasure of meeting on my last trip to South Africa. Gordon is one of these guys who I’m convinced never sleeps; in addition to his day job where he administers a TFS server for a large development…

The Visual Studio 2013 ALM Virtual Machine was upgraded today to include the sample content and hands-on-labs / demo scripts which were previously introduced for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 capabilities. This brings the total number of hands-on-labs and demo scripts which work with this VM to 24. We also used this opportunity to address…

January 10, 2014 Update: I ran some tests again today and activation is working again! Please follow the steps in the “Working with…” document and you should be able to activate the virtual machine now (if not, please let me know). The bad news is that I still don’t know what caused the activation servers…

The RTM version of the Visual Studio 2013 ALM virtual machine and hands-on-labs / demo scripts are now available! You can also find a consolidated list of all of the ALM virtual machines here: https://aka.ms/ALMVMs. Enjoy!

Updated November 26, 2013: This blog post is obsolete now. The fix referenced below has been resolved in the RTM version of the Visual Studio 2013 ALM Virtual Machine. I have received several reports from people about the InRelease Preview Hands-on-Lab I published as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Preview ALM Virtual Machine not…